Category Archives: tools

Subversion: Externals Definitions

Posted on December 22, 2008 by

Externals definitions are a little known but very useful feature of subversion. Using an externals definition, you can create links to different parts of the repository (or even other repositories). Subversion clients then automatically check out the linked content into … Continue reading →

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Understanding the find(1) Utility

Posted on September 27, 2008 by

The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around … Continue reading →

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Reverting a Commit in Subversion

Posted on May 13, 2008 by

Once in a while, someone commits a revision that has to be rolled back later for some reason. Some teams do that as a matter of policy when people check in broken code that doesn’t compile or isn’t able to … Continue reading →

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SSH Public Key Authentication

Posted on January 1, 2008 by

A lot of people use SSH to log into remote hosts. SSH is secure and works well, but if you have to access many hosts with long, well-chosen passwords there is a lot of typing to do just for authentication. … Continue reading →

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From RCS to Mercurial

Posted on December 8, 2007 by

I’ve been a happy user of RCS for years (in fact, my software engineering course at university was held by Walter Tichy, the original author of RCS). The good old Revision Control System may be a dinosaur, but it served … Continue reading →

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Transparent Directory Encryption

Posted on August 8, 2007 by

In a previous article, I discussed sshfs, a user mode filesystem based on FUSE for accessing remote files. Another useful filesystem type is encfs which provides transparent encryption of directories. With encfs, files are stored encrypted in a special directory … Continue reading →

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Mounting Directories via SSH

Posted on June 7, 2007 by

For mounting directories from a remote machine, usually NFS or SMB/CIFS is used which requires a running file server. On many linux servers, however, all you have is a shell account, so file transfer has to be done via scp. … Continue reading →

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